I'm grateful to the Belfast Poetry Festival and judge Anna M. Warrock for choosing my poem "Other Fathers" as the winner of the 2019 Maine Postmark Contest. The judge wrote these kind words of the poem:
The emotion in this poem is carefully registered step by step. This work shows the depth of a so-called list poem and the skill with which the choices made can get it right. Likely the poet made discoveries as they worked to create a multidimensional portrait of the speaker’s inner life and relation to absence, a resonance that resolves into the actual father’s image. The reader can trust the masculinity as defined because the metaphors sharply mark out the speaker’s search, a voice looking toward relation.